aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Madonna’s 11th released today

You know, I waited tables with her sister back in the day. And once she asked me to put something of hers on the sound system. I put on the 12” of Burning Up, my own copy. She mouthed the words and danced in the booth.

Ahh, those were the days.

Hard Candy, Madonna’s 11th studio album, gets as close to a rave as can be imagined from a dance pop icon middle-aged wife and mother of three:

“Hard Candy” sculpts and buffs the renovated nymphet of “Confessions” to a brilliant sheen. It’s like one of those Yoko Ono sculptures made of a bronzed version of one of her old sculptures. If the songs seem straightforward and simple, with titles like “Dance 2 Nite,” “Beat Goes On” and “Give It 2 Me,” it’s because they are. Only a few bother with a metaphor, like “Candy Shop,” or tell a story, like “She’s Not Me.” Thematically, they are in exactly the mode of manufactured disco performers of the late ‘70s like (you might not recognize so many of these names [uh, I do]) France Joli, Rosebud, Taka Boom or Musique. In other words, she’s mining her original source material—the same songs that informed and shaped the Madonna of “Burning Up” and “Physical Attraction.” Could be blah, but Williams, Timberlake and especially Timbaland seize on these disco clichés and make them sound remarkably fresh.

For “Heartbeat,” Williams swipes the beat from Timbaland and Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous,” and adds retro-sounding Donna Summer/Giorgio Moroder synthesizers, and the occasional cowbell. Over a surprisingly poignant melody, Madonna defends her ongoing, almost visceral commitment to club life: “It may feel old to you/ But it feels new to me,” she tells us. “When I dance I feel free/ Which makes me feel like the only one/ That the light shines on.” Sounds as honest as she’ll ever get. The production’s delightfully plastic, as some of her surgery might be also, but Madonna doesn’t stretch credibility by trying to sound younger. Aside from using the term “pimp your style,” she doesn’t jam any rap slang or teen-speak into these songs, nor does she try to fill them with media-ready catchphrases like two of her collaborators did on the way overquoted “Sexyback.”

The honesty is important: Madonna has managed to throw parenthood into the mix without losing too much of her edge, or seeming like a bad mother. If the idea of a 50-year-old woman inviting you to try her “raw, sticky and sweet” confections, as she does on “Candy Shop,” sounds off-putting, first check your ageism and sexism, then recognize that the song can work in terms of parenting too—especially, I’d imagine, the adoptive kind. If you came from poverty in Malawi, and Madonna made you her kid, you’d certainly find her candy-shop lifestyle irresistible. This tightrope M walks between sex, nurturing and aging on “Hard Candy” is more than most rock-star parents, let alone middle-aged ones, could manage gracefully. (Hey, Britney!)

Short on philosophy and long on groove, “Hard Candy” might be the friendliest Madonna record since her debut, not including “The Immaculate Collection.” The songs about sex and dancing simply invite you to dance and have sex, no dysfunction necessary—more important, they make you feel like you might actually want to do one or the other, maybe both. The love songs find Madonna in a position of resolute sorrow—jilted on “She’s Not Me,” the victim of multitasking on “Miles Away”—that’s all the more convincing because of its ironic understatement. “Uncomfortable silence can be so loud,” she observes. You may even learn a few phrases in a foreign language from the moderately goofy “Spanish Lesson.”